Escalations
American Churches don't
get obituaries.
They dwindle
and die decommissioned-
stones intact, doors
and windows
floors, walls and roofs
failing slowly.
Was it location
or belief?
Was it laziness
Was it aging populations
Was it an evolving lack of trust
in mainstream news and worship
as [online] the world watches
Palestinian children
& families
tormented
maimed, wounded and killed
by [American armed] Zionist violence.
poem copyright ©2024 Anne Selden Annab
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| The correspondent's father inspects the rubble that was once their family home, destroyed during an Israeli military offensive, in Deir al-Balah central Gaza Strip, Sept. 2, 2024 |
| Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip; and Jerusalem
The impact of the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip is deeply personal for those living it on the ground, including the Monitor’s correspondents, for whom the intersection of their real lives and news events of just the last few days is a devastating reminder.
Friday Ghada Abdulfattah returned to her neighborhood in the Gaza town of Deir al-Balah after an Israeli military operation left her family home no more than a teetering pile of rubble.
Just weeks ago the house and
compound were home to dozens of people in a sprawling, interconnected
family. They are all now homeless, rejoining the ranks of the estimated
85% of Gaza residents who have been displaced since Oct. 7.... READ MORE https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2024/0903/gaza-home-destroyed-israel-hersh-funeral
[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]
Omar Baddar عمر بدّار
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| Palestinian journalist Hind Al-Khoudary on her nomination for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. |
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I cannot believe I left our house on October 13, 2023 and never grabbed the only photo of my grandfather I had. I cannot believe I never took the photo of my father when was a very young man. You can see my father’s photo behind the Gaza wooden piece. He is on the left putting oranges in boxes. Our house was bombed on Oct. 28.
The only dear thing I took was my own copy of my poetry book. It was stupid of me, I admit, to take something I could replace, though nothing can be really replaced. |
HUMAN RIGHTS FOR EVERYONE EVERYWHERE
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| In Gaza, the distinctive blue flak jackets and helmets of journalists, symbols of the pursuit of truth under dangerous conditions, have now also come to represent Israeli violence and silencing, writes Fatima el Issawi. [GETTY] |
For over the last nearly 11 months, mainstream Western media has framed the ongoing onslaught in Gaza as a ‘classic’ conflict between two parties. The Gaza mass killing, is largely bloodless on televised screens. On social media platforms, another story is unfolding; a torrent of horrific accounts of Israel’s war crimes inflicted on civilians surpassing any surreal imaginary of violence, captured by the victims themselves as well as their perpetrators, the latter proudly celebrating their impunity.
Navigating between my social media feeds and my TV screen, it is hard to believe I am following the same story. Gazans’ encounters with their “bare life” are beyond any hallucinations that our imagination can create, including our own living experiences of trauma.
I was born and raised in a conflict zone in South Lebanon where life was punctuated by Israeli attacks and several invasions. However, Western media remains largely indifferent to the victims. The absence of their shredded bodies from mainstream coverage is more perverse than simple apathy due to lack of geographical and cultural proximity, as we teach our students in journalism courses. Indeed, the media is serving to whitewash Israel’s war crimes and therefore partakes in the erasure of those who it violently targets. Victims are denied the basic right to be acknowledged as suffering subjects.
The implicit message is: it is OK to kill them since some of them are potential terrorists, and their children will likely follow suit.
Passive voices and soft wording that steers clear of terms like “massacre”, “crimes” or “killing”, are just a some of the countless examples of erasure used in mainstream Western reporting.... READ MORE https://www.newarab.com/opinion/western-media-helping-hide-bodies-amid-israels-genocide
[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]
Racism and discrimination are the rejection of all that we stand for.
We must reject and #FightRacism.
Societies around the world are increasingly recognizing the role structural #racism plays in driving social, economic, & political inequalities, but much more needs to be done.
#GoldenRuleThinking
"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and
inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the
foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world..." https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
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| Chief Zwelivelile Mandela, grandson of former South African president & anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela |
"The Palestinian people and their struggle were always close to Madiba's heart. He considered it the greatest moral issue of our time," Zwelivelile tells The New Arab.
"I have no doubt that the ongoing genocide would pain him very much — the daily sight of mangled and maimed bodies, the cries of orphans, and the lament of parents burying their innocent babies and young children. These are matters that would weigh heavily on his heart," says Zwelivelile.
"I do not doubt that he would call out the cold-hearted apartheid Israel killing machine, its war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing."
Zwelivelile said his grandfather would condemn the complicity of the West for supplying bombs of mass destruction, stating that Mandela would pressure Netanyahu to withdraw from occupied Palestinian land, release all Palestinian political prisoners, accept the right to return for all Palestinians in the diaspora, and most importantly, recognize Palestinians' right to self-determination.
"We
all know that ending the occupation and an immediate comprehensive
ceasefire is the only path to finding a lasting solution," added
Zwelivelile, imploring that the world should boycott all countries and
corporations that are complicit in the genocide in Gaza and all the
occupied Palestinian territories.... READ MORE https://www.newarab.com/features/mandela-would-be-mourning-gaza-furious-israel-grandson
[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]
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| Swiss humanitarian relief expert Philippe Lazzarini, heads UNRWA the UN agency responsible for aiding Palestinian refugees. "It is time to reach a political solution to this decades’ long conflict to end the suffering of civilians wherever they are." Philippe Lazzarini |
"Employees at Google have publicly raised concerns about Israel’s use of a number of Google technologies, such as cloud computing and Photos, as well a perceived bias among management at its YouTube unit toward favoring Israel on content and monetization policies. “We’ve seen Israel creatively weaponize a lot of Google services,” says Josh Marxen, a Google Cloud software engineer who has protested his division’s contract with Israel, a deal known as Nimbus.
While
Nimbus has drawn more widespread and public protest, some employees say
they have fumed within Google about Israel’s ad campaigns in part
because users have complained about them"
[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]
A group of almost 70 Palestinian filmmakers — including two-time Oscar nominee Hany Abu Assad, acclaimed director Elia Suleiman and recent BAFTA winner Farah Nabulsi — have signed a strongly-worded letter in which they accuse Hollywood of “dehumanizing” Palestinians on screen over decades, a factor they assert has helped enable the ongoing devastation in Gaza.
[AS
ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO
READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP
SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and
conversations) THAT EMPOWER
DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE &
PEACE... and hopefully
Palestine]
We, Palestinian filmmakers, appreciate and thank the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) for standing up to pressure and insisting on freedom of expression by upholding Bisan Owda’s 2024 News and Documentary Emmy nomination for the documentary, “It’s Bisan From Gaza and I’m Still Alive.”
This film is narrated by the award-winning and inspiring 25-year-old Palestinian journalist, Bisan Owda, who has risked her life to share with the world reports and stories about the resilience, resistance and survival of ordinary Palestinian families in the face of Israel’s ongoing, livestreamed genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Trying to censor Bisan’s voice is only the latest repressive attempt to deny Palestinians the right to reclaim our narrative, share our history, and in this case bring attention to the atrocities our people are facing in the hopes that we can bring an end to them. We well understand the power of image and cinema, and for far too long we have been outraged at the inhumanity and racism shown by some in the Western entertainment industry towards our people, even during this most difficult of times.
Through our films, we have tried to present alternative narratives, depictions and images to reverse the stereotypical, dehumanizing “worthless, disposable beings” image which enables the whitewashing and/or justification of the crimes perpetrated for decades against Palestinians. But why must we always put on our “boxing gloves” to defend our art against ruthless censorship that targets us merely on the basis of our identity, not our creativity?
We wholeheartedly welcomed the nomination of Bisan Owda’s film for an Emmy as an indication that, after so many years of Israel’s apartheid and settler-colonial rule over the Palestinian people, the relentless, decades-old dehumanization of Palestinians on small and big screens in the U.S., in Hollywood in particular, was beginning to give way to a more ethical stance. The censorship attempt against the film, though, was a reality check of sorts. We must still contend with and fiercely challenge the anti-Palestinian and generally anti-Arab racist propaganda that remains all too prevalent in Western entertainment media.
Although we are deeply concerned at how this dehumanization is a danger to our very existence as Palestinians, we are cognizant of how it also puts many racialized communities around the world, including in the West, at risk of a similar fate as the “might makes right” credo prevails.
We call on our international colleagues in the film industry, visionaries for the kind of world we would like to live in, to speak out against this genocide and the erasure, racism and censorship that enable it; to do everything humanly possible to stop and end complicity with this unspeakable horror; and to stand against working with production companies that are deeply complicit in dehumanizing Palestinians, or whitewashing and justifying Israel’s crimes against us.
This has to stop. Now.
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| From Ground Zero is a 2024 anthology film directed by 22 different Palestinian directors.[1] The film is made up of 22 short films, including documentaries, fiction, animation and experimental films about the current situation of the people of Gaza |
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| Dr. Mustafa Barghouti |